Standing Up Against Hate debuts today! It's the story of how black women in the U.S. Army changed the course of WWII. It's an honor and a privilege to tell the stories of these courageous women. Here's a sample of feedback I've gotten on the book.★Starred Review, School Library Connection:"A nonfiction writer for youth audiences, Farrell settles in to explain with depth and precision the fight black women faced both in and out of the military as World War II surged. Focused specifically on black women in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), the book profiles several key figures, including Major Charity Adams who commanded the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion.

"In addition to the deft writing, images are presented every few pages that reveal a score of brave women who persevered despite suffering discrimination. The women had to proclaim their equality in the face of segregation in the mess hall and in dispatching the unit overseas.

"The text also details how some servicewomen were jailed for disobeying orders or even beaten by civilians while wearing their uniforms. Organized chronologically, the text is accessible for middle school and high school historians who are intrigued by institutional racism or women in the military for research. It profiles milestones in the 6888th’s preparation and deployment, providing a well-researched understanding of the time period for black women in the military.

"The book is a gem that profiles an underrepresented narrative in American history."​Available at the links below or your favorite bookstore.

Watching record numbers of women sworn into the U.S. Congress, I couldn't help but think of the bitter congressional debate during World War II about establishing the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps. The controversy was really about where women did or didn't belong.

"This war is not teas, dances, card parties and amusements," Congressman Clare Eugene Hoffman of Michigan said. "You take a poll of the honest-to-goodness women at home, the women who have families, the women who sew on the buttons, do the cooking, mend the clothing, do the washing, and you will find there is where they want to stay—in the homes.”

​Apparently, 150,000 women did not want to stay at home, which is how many volunteered for army service during WWII. One of those was Dovey Johnson of Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the first African American woman commissioned as a WAAC officer. Read more about Dovey in Standing Up Against Hate.(Pre-order here.) The book comes out January 8th.

Dovey worked as an assistant to Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, who was the only African American in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet. When Congress approved the WAAC, Dr. Bethune demanded that black women, not only be allowed to enlist, but to be trained as officers right along beside white women.

At first, Dr. Bethune's logic fell on deaf ears, but she convinced Eleanor Roosevelt that black women deserved equal opportunity, and the First Lady convinced her husband.

Dr. Bethune had long been a family friend, but when Dovey went to work for her, she had no idea the plan was for her to join the army!

Here's an excerpt of an interview with Dovey Johnson Roundtree seven decades later. She talks about rumors the women of the WAAC were meant to be "companions" for the soldiers.

This interview was conducted by the National Visionary Leader Project in 2009. You can see the full interview here.​

Teachers: Check out this lesson plan you can use with students to look at gender roles in America in the 1940s and how the idea of women serving in the military threatened prevailing attitudes about the duties of women.

She grew up working in the tobacco fields of Wake County, North Carolina. Her parents had a large family, ten children, because sharecropping required many hands and all-consuming labor.

How did Clara Leach make the leap from the Jim Crow south to Brigadier General in the U.S. Army?

She wrote the story of her life after retirement to set the record straight. "I was increasingly encountering people who assumed that I was successful because I was born with a “silver spoon” in my mouth or I just “got lucky.”

At age five Clara cooked and tended younger siblings in a house with no electricity or running water, while her parents and older siblings grew and harvested tobacco for a white landowner.

Soon Clara graduated to field work. That included planting, hoeing, pulling weeds, walking the rows "topping" off the buds to stimulate growth, and picking worms off the leaves and squishing them.

​"Growing tobacco...is a very difficult crop...labor intensive," Clara says. "So my father and mother had ten children, and we were all employed full time on that farm in tobacco."

Photo: The daughter of an African American sharecropper at work in a tobacco field in Wake County, North Carolina. Credit: Dorothea Lange, July 1939.

First ingredient in the elixir for success:Learn to work hard.

Clara's parents believed in education as well as hard work. And though she missed a lot of school due to farm work, Clara skipped two grades and graduated at sixteen, salutatorian of her class.

The painful experience of prejudice at her segregated school in Wake County launched the attitude that would carry Clara from the soil of North Carolina to the halls of the Pentagon.

Segregated School, Illinois, 1937.

"Many members of the African-American community considered dark skin ugly. Unattractive. Undesirable. That message came across loud and clear in terms of which students were favored by teachers, and by other students," Clara says. "When I raised my hand, the teacher would never call on me."

"Instead, a kid with straight hair and fair skin always got picked. Some of them were really smart, but so was I. It was all part of a warped value system that some black people still embrace today-the closer you are to being white, the better off and more beautiful you are."

Clara's mother told her beauty was skin deep and that what others thought of her didn't matter. "It's what you think of yourself that matters," she said. It was a good lesson but it didn't take away the sting of being passed over.

Clara made a decision. ​

Elixir for success:Education

"I spent a lot of time getting even smarter, because I knew knowledge could never be snatched from me, regardless of whether I was high yellow or black as midnight," says Clara. Those early snubs and slights I experienced due to skin color further motivated me to excel. They lit a fire under me that drove me to succeed not just at academics, but at whatever endeavor I tackled."

She went college at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to study nursing. There Clara took part in the the famous Greensboro sit-ins at the Woolworth's lunch counter.

She told an interviewer for the Women Veterans Historical Project about her experience with non-violent protest. "When people push you, spit on you, curse you and do those kinds of things, it’s very difficult not to raise your hand. But in reality, when you think about it, it’s quite a powerful thing to be able to sit and do nothing while people do that."

Students protesting segregation at the lunch counter of the Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina. Photo: Library of Congress

To fund her last two years of college, Clara signed up for the Army Student Nurse Program scholarship. After graduation in 1961. she entered the U.S. Army Nurse Corps as a 2nd Lieutenant.

​Her values of hard work and a positive attitude continued to serve her well as she met obstacles as a woman and a black in the army.

"Obstacles are not really there to stop one’s progress. They are really opportunities for us to decide how we will overcome them to reach our goals. If we keep the goal in mind, then we can decide if we will go over, under, around or through the obstacle to accomplish it."

Essential:Attitude

​In 1965, Clara became a medical-surgical nursing instructor at Fort Sam Houston where she became the first woman in the army to earn the Expert Field Medical Badge. She continued to rise in the ranks and continue her education, the first nurse corps officer to graduate from the Army War College and the first woman to earn a Master’s Degree in military arts and sciences from the Army’s Command and General Staff College.

Assigned to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Clara trained a generation of nurses and then became the first African American to serve as vice president and chief of the department of nursing at the hospital. In 1987 she was promoted to Brigadier General and named Chief of the Army Nurse Corps and Chief of Army medical personnel.

The list of Clara Leach Adams-Enders' accomplishments in the army is long and impressive, including formal distinctions like the Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster and informal such as recruiting minority student nurses at Walter Reed.

She led the Army Nurse Corps through two major combat operations, Just Cause and Desert Shield/Storm. Clara is also known for her remarkable warmth and humility.

With hard work, education and the right attitude, Clara Leach Adams-Ender made the journey from sharecropper's daughter to the highest ranks of the U.S. Army. Her success also stands on the shoulders of those who trod this path before her. Thousands of African American women overcame obstacles to serve with distinction in the U.S. Army during WWII. Read their story in Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Helped Change the Course of WWII.

At least I thought it did. Turns out a black woman soldier in the 1860s beat them to it.

Painting by William Jennings, U.S. Army Profiles of Bravery

Cathey Williams disguised herself as a man and enlisted in Company A of the Thirty-Eighth Infantry Regiment in St. Louis, November 1866.

She switched her name to William Cathey, and after what must have been a cursory exam, the army surgeon declared her fit for duty.

Private Cathay was 22-years-old and had actually been serving as an cook for the army throughout most of the civil war. Cathey told her story to a reporter for the St. Louis Daily Times in 1875.

"My Father a was a freeman, but my mother a slave....While I was a small girl my master and family moved to Jefferson City, [Missouri]....When the war broke out and the United States soldiers came to Jefferson City they took me and other colored folks with them to Little Rock. Col. Benton of the 13th army corps was the officer that carried us off. I did not want to go. He wanted me to cook for the officers, but I had always been a house girl and did not know how to cook."

She had little choice. She learned to cook. At sixteen, swallowed by the union army, Cathey saw the Battle of Pea Ridge, a major battle of the Civil War fought near Leetown, northeast of Fayetteville, Arkansas, after which her unit traveled to Louisiana. "I saw the soldiers burn lots of cotton and was at Shreveport when the rebel gunboats were captured and burned on Red River." As a servant under General Phillip Sheridan, Cathey saw the soldiers' life on the front lines as his army marched on the Shenandoah Valley. ​ After the war, African American soldiers were posted to the Western frontier, where they battled Native Americans to protect settlers, stagecoaches, wagon trains and railroad crews. They became known as “Buffalo Soldiers,” apparently so-named by Native Americans, though history's a little thin on when and why.

Ranks of Buffalo Soldiers who fought in Cuba during the Spanish American war, 1889. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

​After working for the army throughout the war, it's little wonder Cathey came up with the scheme to enlist as the fighting came to a close. With cunning and courage she found a way to survive when opportunities for black women were few to none.​As a Buffalo Soldier, Cathey learned to use a musket, stood guard duty and went on scouting missions. After serving at Fort Riley, Kansas for some months, her company marched 563 miles to Fort Union, New Mexico.

Official reports show Buffalo Soldiers were often sent to the most bitter posts and suffered racist officers, severe discipline and crummy gear, food and shelter. In two years of service, mostly in New Mexico, Cathey needed hospital care four different times for illnesses ranging from "the itch" to rheumatism, yet maintained her secret.

William Cathey's enlistment records (Courtesy the National Archives)

Cathey enlisted for three years, but after two, she was tired of army life and wanted out. She told the St. Louis reporter, “I played sick, complained of pains in my side, and rheumatism in my knees. The post surgeon found out I was a woman and I got my discharge."

All indications are that she was a good soldier.

Monument to Cathay Williams, the first-known documented African American woman to serve in the U.S. Army, located in Leavenworth, Kansas. (Courtesy KansasCity.com)

​After her honorable discharge, Cathey worked as a civilian cook and washer woman. Until she could not longer work due to diabetes and nerve pain which required the amputation of her toes. She was unable to walk without a crutch.

In 1891, Cathey petitioned for a veterans pension and benefits. The government rejected her claim, not because she was a woman, that was never argued. The army doctor who examined her found her to be fit, not disabled enough for benefits. There's no record of the life or death of Cathey Williams following that denial of benefits.

You've probably heard of the WWII "Great Escape." Now comes the thrilling story of the "Grand Escape," which served to inspire the World War II getaway made famous by Steve McQueen, James Garner and company.

The WWI prison break is featured in a new book getting rave reviews and I had the great pleasure of speaking with its author.

Digging only with spoons, over nine-months they forged a secret tunnel 60-yards long to escape the Germans' highest-security prison, Holzminden.

The prison was ruled by a brutal camp commandant, Carl Niemayer. Notorious for his temper, he didn't hesitate to have prisoners shot or beaten to death for lesser infractions than trying to escape.

The place was nicknamed "Hellminden" or "Hellhole" by those within its walls.

The photo below shows three organizers of the tunneling operation posed in their escape disguises. From right to left, are Royal Flying Corps pilots Captain Caspar Kennard, Captain David Gray and 2nd Lieutenant Cecil Blain.

Photo courtesy Hugh Lowe

​Despite the risk of discovery and probable execution they found the strength to continue the grueling work for months. Starving and emaciated, disease-ridden and sleep-deprived, inch by inch they carved the tunnel in oxygen-starved darkness, directly under the feet of one hundred armed guards.​​​​​​​

"There’s one kind of daring that is running out and knowing you might get shot," Author Neal Boscom told me. "Then another is digging in the tunnel, going in thirty feet, not knowing if you’re gonna have enough oxygen to breathe, not knowing if you’re gonna get out."

Bascom has written nine award-winning books for adults and teens, including Hunting Eichmann, Red Mutiny, The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler's Atomic Bomb, and The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes. One Goal. And Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It.

The Escape Artists is a young adult version of his earlier books The Grand Escape.

Bascom is driven to research and write about people who fascinate him and whose stories will inspire others. "I want know what drove them, what they feared, what stumbling blocks they hit."

Capt. David Gray, courtesy Patrick Mallahan

In The Escape Artists, Bascom focuses on Davy Gray, the leader of the digging operation. Gray tried and failed to escape from five different camps in one year before Holzmiden.

Bascom was struck my the young pilot's determination and motivation for continually trying to escape. "He was driven by wanting to get back to his squadron and back into the fight. Less about being free, less about his own individual drive, but to get back into the fight knowing that he could be shot down again and killed."

The original conspirators had hoped to keep knowledge of the escape plan to a small group, but July 23-24, 1918, twenty-nine officers belly-crawled through the 16-inch high tunnel to freedom. Unfortunately some were recaptured, and just ten made their way to Holland and eventually Britain, including Gray, Kennard and Blain.

​​​​​​​Bascom told me there are similar over-arching themes in every book he writes that stem from his teenage years. "I remember to this day sitting in classroom in 8th grade, the teacher wasn’t even talking about history, but she said. 'Never make a decision out of a fear of failure.' Defy the odds and keep going despite the fear of failure."

Huge shout out to the Austin Public Library Manchaca Road Branch for inviting me to speak in celebration of Veteran's Day.

Add a shout out to reader Keith Hunter for this Veteran's Day story. He emailed to share new information that surfaced recently about the American POW women featured in my book ​PURE GRIT.

The Wisconsin State Historical Society has postedscrapbooks online telling the story of Army Nurse Marcia Gates posted to the Philippines before the start of World War II and later captured POW by the Japanese.

The collection of two scrapbooks immediately reveals the desperation and hope of Lieutenant Marcia Gates' mother after the surrender of American forces to the Japanese attack in the Philippines.

Also named Marica Gates, the woman wrote letter after letter in an effort to discover if her daughter was dead or alive.

The War Department notified Mrs. Gates that Marcia was missing in action. She sought further information from the government, plus the Red Cross, the San Francisco Press Association, and television station WRG that had received tape recordings of American nurses who had escaped before the surrender. Nobody had any news of her daughter.

The family had received a letter from Marcia dated the day of Corregidor's surrender. I can't help but wonder if they believed the lies mixed with the cheerful optimism the young nurse sent to comfort her mother.

"Another short note to remind you again that I am safe and well and will be always, I'm sure. Now you must keep yourself the same. Sure am enjoying my work, plus plenty of food and rest. ​The weather where we are now is ideal—evenings cool, days windy and dry. Now don't worry because that would be silly. It anything does happen to me it will to everyone here. Just think, I wanted adventure and I got it."

The Japanese attack on the Philippines cut right to the heart of the small town of Janesville, Wisconsin.

As well as Army Nurse Marcia Gates, ninety-nine men from the town were serving there. A week prior to the attack A company of the 192 Tank Battalion had arrived at Ft. Stotsenburg and Clark Field.

​They became the first American tank unit to engage enemy armor in tank to tank combat during World War II.

Many were kids, some still in high school. Others had been in the National Guard for years, but most had never expected to see actual combat. Those who survived the fighting, faced the Bataan Death March and the horrors of prison camp until the end of the war. Known as the Janesville 99, only 35 of the men survived to come home.

​Twenty of the survivors are pictured at left.

The second Gates scrapbook documents Marcia's joyous homecoming as well as that of the Janesville men who survived the war. Army Nurse Alice Hahn was from nearby Cleveland Wisconsin.

You can see the scrapbooks here... And more about the Janesville 99 here...

In the Nixon Era, Republicans discounted Martha Mitchell's accusations, saying she was mentally unstable. Her attacker got promoted and President Trump recently promoted him again.

In voting to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the swing voters said the same thing about Christine Blasey Ford. They just used more subtle phrasing. They implied she had been so traumatized she couldn't tell what was real and what was not.

Nothing has changed but the excuses people use to justify discounting women's stories, and the science that would support them.

Richard Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says trauma would only help a woman remember an attack more clearly.​

“The person lying on top of you — who she’d previously met — you’re not going to forget that,” he told the Washington Post. “There’s a total consensus in the field of memory ... If anything, fear and trauma enhances the encoding of the memory at a molecular level." It's the reason people never forget details of where they were on 9/11, or the day President John F. Kennedy was shot.​​Martha and John Mitchell came to the white house from Arkansas in President Richard Nixon's first term, he as attorney general. She publicly and loudly supported the president for a second term as her husband took over the president's re-election campaign.

Martha & husband John Mitchell, attorney general in the Richard Nixon administration.

​But then Martha began to suspect Nixon's men were up to "dirty tricks." She listened in on her husband's meetings with Nixon, and concluded members of the campaign were acting illegally.

​Martha had always spoken her mind; the press had dubbed her "mouth from the south."

She complained about the label, which wasn’t applied to men in Washington. “Why do they always call me outspoken? Can’t they just say I’m frank?” She asked. The name calling got worse.

The night arrests in the Watergate break-in hit the news, Martha called reporter Helen Thomas of United Press International to say she thought her husband and the president were somehow involved.

The phone call was suddenly cut short. According to Thomas, “…it appeared someone took away the phone from her hand." She heard Martha say, ‘You just get away.’” Thomas said she called back and the hotel operator told her, “Mrs. Mitchell is indisposed and cannot talk.”

Martha later charged an FBI agent named Stephen King ripped the phone from her hands and subsequently threw her down and kicked her to keep her from making any phone calls. She says under orders from her husband she was locked in her room incommunicado for 24-hours. She was given alcohol, but no food.

This seems like a good point in the story to introduce Stephen King (shown at left). After Nixon was re-elected in 1972, King left the FBI for private industry. Then last year, he was appointed Ambassador to the Czech Republic by Donald Trump.

During his confirmation hearings, no questions came up about allegations he helped in the Watergate cover-up, or that he assaulted a woman to that end.

Martha Mitchell claimed King held her prisoner despite a number of escape attempts. When she tried to exit through a glass door they got into a tussle that broke the glass and her hand was cut so badly she required six stitches.

Martha said a doctor was finally summoned to aide King in keeping her a prisoner. King forced Martha onto the bed and held her down while the doctor removed her pants and gave her a shot of tranquilizer.

A reporter who spoke with Martha after she was released described her as “a beaten woman,” with “incredible" black and blue marks on her arms.

As Nixon fought for his office and reputation, his administration briefed the press about the Martha's lack of credibility. She was portrayed as a paranoid, publicity-seeking and, possibly alcoholic, housewife. Rumors spread that she had been institutionalized for insanity.

Martha wanted Nixon to fire Steve King, but the agent was promoted to chief of security. After leaving the FBI he went on to a lucrative career in chemical manufacturing.

Arriving in Prague, last December, to take up duties as Trump's Ambassador to the Czech Republic, King told Radio Free Europe reporters, "I was there when this matter occurred [with Martha Mitchell]....But I have chosen -- then and now -- not to really speak to it specifically only out of respect to the Mitchell family, those that survive today."

Nixon himself said, “If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have been no Watergate [scandal].” Scandal, he means. But by the time he resigned in August of 1974, Martha's marriage had crumbled, she appeared to have possibly had an emotional breakdown and had suffered embarrassing publicity.

So far, the only justice for Martha has been in the form of recognition by the mental health community. Harvard psychologist Brendan Maher encountered mental patients incorrectly diagnosed as being delusional, when it turned out their "delusions" were true. He named this the Martha Mitchell Effect. The effect is not a mental problem of the patient, but a mental block on the part of the psychiatrist.

Seems like today we have a mental block on the part of half the senators in Washington.

Thanks to YA Author Jody Casella for telling me about Martha Mitchell. Another courageous woman whose story I had not known.

''The question asked has always been Who betrayed Anne Frank and the people in hiding? This explicit focus on betrayal, however, has limited the perspective on the arrest. Scenarios based on other premises have never been examined at length."

Researchers took a new tactic, for the first time asking 'Why did the raid on the Secret Annex take place, and on what information was it based?"

They took another look at Anne's famous diary. Particularly, what she wrote about two men she called "B" and "D" arrested for dealing in illegal ration cards “so we have no coupons.” This led researchers to Dutch Judicial records where they found two men from the building had been arrested earlier in 1944, and then released.

Since the end of World War II, at least five people have come under suspicion for betraying the hiding place at Amsterdam 263 Prinsengracht. Despite official investigations and biographers' theories, there is no convincing proof of a culprit.

The new research isn't solid proof either, but it opens the possibility thatinvestigators stumbled upon Anne Frank by chance.

Anne, her sister Margot and their parents, Otto and Edith were caught August 4, 1944 along with four other Jews hiding with them.

The bookcase pictured here had been constructed to camouflage entry into a part of the building out of view from the street.

Of the eight Jewish people seized, only Otto Frank survived the concentration camps. Anne died of typhus at age 15 at Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

In 2015, researchers at the Anne Frank House gathered evidence that Anne and Margot died a month earlier than previously believed, in February 1945, rather than late March of that year.

Anne Frank House researcher Erika Prins told the Guardian: “When you say they died at the end of March, it gives you a feeling that they died just before liberation [April 15, 1945]. So maybe if they’d lived two more weeks …” Prins said, her voice trailing off. “Well, that’s not true any more.”Below: After liberation, female German camp guards are forced to unload a truck full of bodies of dead prisoners at Bergen-Belsen, April 1945. George Rodger—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.

The earlier March 31 date of Anne’s death was set by Dutch authorities after the war when they did not have the resources to establish an exact date. The new evidence includes statements from a friend who saw Anne in Bergen-Belsen and remembered the Frank sisters showing signs of typhus in early February. Dutch health authorities say typhus deaths happen around 12 days after the first symptoms.

“In view of this, the date of their death is more likely to be sometime in February. The exact date is unknown,” the researchers said.

In the words of Bergen-Belsen survivor Rachel van Amerongen, "One day they simply weren’t there any more."

Seven decades after her death, Anne Frank stands as an example of resistance and courage in the face of inhuman cruelty and persecution.

To view a short video showing friends talking about seeing Anne in Bergen-Belsen, click here...

Cornelia Fort was born to wealth andprivilege, but in a time and place that prescribed her a very narrow role in life. Yet she made bold choices push boundaries and lived of life of daring and adventure few women would even dream of.

Would she have made the same choices, if she'd known it would lead to hear at 24?Growing up in a luxurious mansion built in 1815 on the banks of the Cumberland River in Tennessee, she was expected to become a Southern debutante, attend society functions, marry and have children.

At eighteen, Cornelia wanted to attendSarah Lawrence Collegewhere young women could design their own course of study. Her father at first refused to allow her to apply to that "liberal northern school"and she was sent to Ogontz School for Young Ladies.

In her first major rebellion against the "proper" role assigned to her, Cornelia got her mother to help change her father's mind. She was finally allowed to leave the "oppressive atmosphere" and transfer to Sarah Lawrence, where she graduated with a two-year degree.

Cornelia's next bold move challenging the strictures of women's lives in the 1940s,set her on a course leading to the skies over Pearl Harborat the very hour​the Japanese attacked.

At age five, with her father and three older brothers, Cornelia saw a daring pilot perform acrobatics in the sky.

It appeared so dangerous, Dr. Rufus Fort made his sons promise ( as one story goes, swear an oath on the family bible) they would never fly.

Later, when Cornelia made her first solo flight, one brother chided her for breaking a promise to their father. But Dr. Fort had not thought to ask his daughter not to fly.

She was hooked from her very first time in the sky, saying “It gets under your skin, deep down inside.”

Cornelia Fort became the first female flying instructor in all of Tennessee in 1940. The next year she got a job in Hawaii teaching defense workers, soldiers and sailors to fly.

In November 1941, Cornelia wrote home (her father had died more than year before). "If I leave here, I will leave the best job that I can have (unless the national emergency creates a still better one), a very pleasant atmosphere, a good salary, but far the best of all are the planes I fly. Big and fast and better suited for advanced flying.

On December 7, 1941, she was in the sky with a student pilot when a small plane nearly collided with them. Cornelia grabbed the controls and saved their lives.

Later, she said the plane “passed so close under us that our celluloid windows rattled violently and I looked down to see what kind of plane it was. The painted red balls on the tops of the wings shone brightly in the sun. I looked again with complete and utter disbelief. Honolulu was familiar with the emblem of the Rising Sun on passenger ships but not on airplanes.”

“Then I looked way up and saw the formations of silver bombers riding in. Something detached itself from an airplane and came glistening down. My eyes followed it down, down, and even with knowledge pounding in my mind, my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor. I knew the air was not the place for my little baby airplane and I set about landing as quickly as ever I could. A few seconds later a shadow passed over me, and simultaneously bullets spattered all around me.”​See below the entry in Cornelia's logbook for that flight

“Later, we counted anxiously as our little civilian planes came flying home to roost. Two never came back. They were washed ashore weeks later on the windward side of the island, bullet-riddled. Not a pretty way for the brave yellow Cubs and their pilots to go down to death.”

Cornelia survived. And then stepped out of bounds again.

She knew the risks when she became one of the first to volunteer for Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squad (WAFS) “I felt I could be doing something more constructive for my country than knitting socks. Better to go to war than lose the things that make life worth living.”

“Because there were so many disbelievers in women pilots, especially in their place in the army....We had to deliver the goods or else. Or else there wouldn’t ever be another chance for women pilots in any part of the service.”

The WAFS ferried planes for the U.S. military during WWII, flying them from factories to points of embarkation. The group later merged with the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP).

The women pilots faced painful prejudice from some of the male pilots, who Cornelia said went "to great lengths to discredit them whenever possible.”

The end came quickly, and far to soon. March 21, 1943, flying over Texas in a six-plane formation, Cornelia's Fort's wing tip was clipped by another plane. She crashed to the ground and died instantly.

Cornelia was twenty-four, and became the first female pilot in American history to die in the line of duty, though the WAFS were not recognized as official military service members 1977.​​​​​​​

A year prior to her death, Cornelia had written her mother, poetically describing how much she had loved life, loved green pastures and cities,

sunshine on the plains and rain in the mountains, blue jeans, red wine, books, music and the kindness of friends. She wrote:

If I die violently, who can say it was "before my time"? I should have dearly loved to have had a husband and children. My talents in that line would have been pretty good but if that was not to be, I want no one to grieve for me.

I was happiest in the sky--at dawn when the quietness of the air was like a caress, when the noon sun beat down and at dusk when the sky was drenched with the fading light. Think of me there and remember me​​​​​​​...Love, Cornelia.

Cornelia's story reminds me we do not have time to be mired in self-doubt and regret. We make the best decisions we can without the benefit of knowing how they will unfold. Like Cornelia, I want to choose boldly and love life hugely. What about you?

When you hear the call: "Build the wall"take a moment and tell someone about Carmellita Torres.

This 17-year-old girl sparked a protest on the Juarez/El Paso border in 1917 when customs officials ordered her to undress and submit to being doused with gasoline.

The kind of guys in charge back then were the same kind of guys we have in charge now. So, unfortunately, Carmellita's ​courageous action did not bring change.

But women's voices are being heard today, in way they never have been before.

Carmellita Torres freely crossed the border from Mexico almost every day to work as a maid for an American family. She wasn't alone.

Farmers and ranchers in the Southwest were completely dependent on Mexican labor. White families in El Paso could easily afford the wages they paid Mexican girls and women to do their cleaning and laundry.

So many Mexicans from Juarez came to El Paso every day for work that a trolley was set up for them to ride across the Santa Fe Bridge between the two cities.

But El Paso Mayor Tom Lea, Jr. feared Carmellita and the other workers, whom he called "dirty, lousy, destitute," would carry lice and cause a typhus epidemic in his city.

Rates of typhus infection were no higher in El Paso, than they were in other large American cities. But in January 1917, Mexicans were suddenly required to show a certificate to cross the border, a certificate indicating that "the bearer, ___ has been this day deloused, bathed, vaccinated, clothing and baggage disinfected.”​​​​​​​

Carmellita and the others were forced to strip nude for inspection, bathe, and be drenched in gasoline to kill any lice that might be on their bodies. Their clothing and shoes were fumigated and put through a steam dryer.

The women were subjected to lewd comments and there were rumors that nude photographs of them were showing up in nearby bars.

Sunday morning, January 28th, 1917, Carmellita reached the end of her trolley ride and was told to get off, take a bath and bedisinfected. She refused.

Carmellita convinced thirty other women on the trolley to refuse as well. By 8AM the crowd of protesters, mostly servant girls, grew to 200 and packed half the bridge. Some of the women stopped the trolley by laying down on ​the tracks. By noon some 2000 people stood with Carmellita.

Both Mexican and American soldiers showed up to subdue the crowd, and Monday morning it was back to fumigation as usual.

There's little trace of Carmellita Torres in the pages of history. She's named in the newspaper for leading what came to be called"the bath house riots," and we know that she and eight other women were arrested and went to jail for "inciting riot" that day.

Their stories may have been passed down the years orally, but the white men writing the newspapers and making the rulespreserved a different story.

The reporter for the El Paso Morning Times wrote that once​Mexicans got familiar with the bathing process, they would welcome it. He said the Mexicans"came out [of the bath house] with clothes wrinkled from the steam sterilizer, hair wet and faces shining, generally laughing and in good humor."

Raul Delgado, a man who went through the "cleansing" gave his description decades later. “An immigration agent with a fumigation pump would spray our whole body with insecticide, especially our rear and our partes nobles. Some of us ran away from the spray and began to cough. Some even vomited from the stench of those chemical pesticides…the agent would laugh at the grimacing faces we would make. He had a gas mask on, but we didn’t."

Bracero workers, hired for seasonal farm work, are sprayed with DDT after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in 1956. (Smithsonian Institution)​​​​​​​

​The risk of typhus has been used by both American and German leaders to whip up fear and prejudice against a segment of the population they wanted to deem inferior.

​The notion that Mexicans crossing into the U.S. for work each day would carry lice and cause a typhus epidemic, was used as an excuse to spray them with toxic chemicals. Men, women and children crossing the Juarez/El Paso border were doused or sprayed with chemicals like gasoline and DDT for more than 40-years.

​In Poland, the Nazis posted placards around Warsaw in 1940 declaring that Jewish people were infested with lice and carrying typhus. To protect the rest of the populace all Jews were required to move into a small section of the city that became the Warsaw Ghetto. ​

"These records point to the connection between the U.S. Customs disinfection facilities in El Paso-Juárez in the 20s and the Desinfektionskammern (disinfection chambers) in Nazi Germany...."

I discovered an article written in a German scientific journal written in 1938, which specifically praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B," writes Romo.

In 1939, the Nazis started usingZyklon B to fumigate people at border crossings and concentration camps. Later, they used Zyklon B pellets in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps, not to kill lice, but people.

In 1917, after Carmellita's protest, the US/Mexican border was closed for the first time, customs officialsprohibiting anyone from crossing without authorization. That is, without the required fumigation of their clothing, shoes and body.

That year alone, 127,000 people suffered humiliation and were doused with toxic disinfectant at the El Paso end of the Santa Fe Bridge. This federal policy would promulgate a stereotypical negative view of Mexicans and their American descendants for decades to come.​U.S. Public Health Service photos thanks to https://elpasogasbaths.weebly.com/​​​​​​​

Marjory Stoneman Douglas earned her place in history for helping preserve the Florida Everglades.​​​​​​​She did it all in the second half of life.

At first glance Marjory appears an unlikely heroine. She began her journalism career as the society reporter for the Miami Herald and later published short stories and novels.

She rarely went out for a picnic, let alone visited the crocodile invested Everglades, saying it was "too buggy, too wet, and too generally inhospitable....I know it’s out there, and I know it’s important.... There are no other Everglades in the world."

South Florida land developers considered the Everglades a useless swamp just waiting for them to turn it into shopping malls and subdivision.

​​​​Marjory wrote stories set in South Florida and vividly described the natural world. She was writing a novel 1941 when an editor asked her to write a non-fiction book addressing threats to the Everglades and she agreed.

Scientists warned if the area wasn't protected, soon all wildlife there would be extinct.

They are unique...in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose," wrote Marjory.​​​​​​​"The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida."

At age 57, Marjory published The Everglades: River of Grass. It hit the shelves in November 1947 and sold out before Christmas. The impact of the book is sometimes compared to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

And it launched Marjory into her role as an environmental activist, which took up the next 51-years of her life.She founded Friends of the Everglades, wrote more books on the subject and fought developers, the Army Corp of Engineers, and anyone else who threatened the unique species and habitat of South Florida.

"[She's a] tiny, slim, perfectly dressed, utterly ferocious grande dame who can make a redneck shake in his boots," said Assistant Secretary of the Interior Nathaniel Reed. "When Marjory bites you, you bleed."

Marjory's wisdom is crucial today as we face climate change. She said. "I would be very sad if I had not fought. I'd have a guilty conscience if I had been here and watched all this happen to the environment and not been on the right side."

In 1990, Marjory published her autobiography, Voice of the River beginning with the admission "the hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself."

And ending with the advice, "life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or a longer life, are not necessary."

Marjory lived “my own life in my own way,” for 108 years.​​​​​​​ Her spirit gives me hope and challenges me live vividly and intensely.

Second grader LaVaun Smith heard agreat uproar outside her school in southeast Kansas. She and the other students rushed to the door of their country school house to see the commotion.

They threw open the door that cold December day in 1921, and a rowdy parade of women filled the road beating on dish pans, wash pans and metal buckets with sticks and kitchen utensils. A number of the students spotted their mothers as the women converged on the mine across the road to confront strike-breakers, who had taken their husbands' coal mining jobs.

The school kids' dads had struck the mines in Crawford and Cherokee County three months prior, but companies kept operations running with non-union workers, and the sheriff arrested labor leaders for violating a statewide strike injunction.With a harsh winter on the horizen coming, wives, mothers, and sisters of the mine workers decided to take things into their own hands. Gathering before dawn, December 12, they marched through the region, routing "scabs" at 63 different mines.

No fear in these women’s hearts

One marcher recorded in her diary, the women “rolled down to the [mine] pits like balls and the men ran like deers....There was absolutely no fear in these women’s hearts.”

The throng of marching women, some pregnant and others carrying small children, grew from two-thousand to possibly six-thousand. For three days they completely shut down coal production in the region.​​

One of the leaders, Mary Skubitz, had immigrated from Slovenia as a child. ​According to her son Joe, "Hunger drove most of those women. They just wanted something to eat and a house."

Mary spoke German, Italian, and Slovene, which allowed her to rally a broad spectrum of women in the mining camps. Fluent in English as well, she was persuasive with the mine bosses and strikebreakers.

Kansas Governor Henry Allen dispatched four companies of the Kansas National Guard, including a machine gun division to get the women back to their kitchens. The women, armed only with their pots, pans and red pepper spray, marched from mine to mine singing hymns and waving American flags.

The first day there was little violence, but the following two days when large numbers of men joined the protest, strikebreakers were beaten and property vandalized, inflaming headlines across the nation.

The New York Times declared them an Amazon Army...on the warpath...invading mines and scattering workers with pepper spray.

December 16, Sheriff Milt Gould arrested Mary and three other women, who spent one night in jail due a $750 bail.

Over the following month, the sheriff and his deputies hoped to make massive arrests, bystanders would not cooperate in naming names, and women protesters told deputies they could not recall who had marched beside them.

Deputies jailed 50-some men and women who participated in the action. AndCrawford County District Judge Andrew Curran handed down fines to forty-nine protesters for disturbing the peace, unlawful assembly, and assault.

The marching women were characterized by the newspapers in one of two ways. Benjamin W. Goossen write in Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains (Autumn 2011), "​​​​​​​either it was a laughable “Petticoat March” of witless and misguided domestics, or the attack of a ferocious 'Amazon Army' that threatened to destroy traditional notions of women’s role in society." ​​​​​

The Wichita Beacon described them as “a few women, peeking from behind windows, sometimes waving handkerchiefs and sometimes ‘making eyes’ at the soldiers."

The Kansas City Kansan labed them “women terrorists,” who “clawed and used teeth” like “tigresses.”

Some of the women defended themselves in letters to the editors, and small groups of women continued to accost strikebreakers even after the strike was called off.

The following election season, (this was just two years after American women got the vote) the women who had tested their strength marching turned their energy to campaigning against the men who'd opposed them. Both Sheriff Gould, who had arrested dozens of marchers and Judge Curran, who had sentenced them were ousted from office.

Author Jim Ure was writing a novel when a true story side-tracked him, the story of a woman's disappearance that has remained unsolved for more than seventy years.

His new book,Seized by the Sun tells how Gertrude Tompkins (left), a shy, awkward girl who stuttered, growing up to be one of only a handful of U.S. women test pilots during WWII. Her job was to take new or repaired planes to the sky and put them through tight turns, stalls, dives and spins making sure they were safe.

Below: P-51 Mustang fighter​​​​​​​s. Gertrude was one of only 126 WASP pilots good enough to fly these fighter planes. Her first flight in a powerful P-51 cured the debilitating stutter that had plagued her since childhood.

It was later in the war, on a routine flight, that Gertrude disappeared while ferrying a factory-new plane a short distance between two airfields in California

Author James Ure is on the blog today, telling us how he got hooked on the story.

Author Jim Ure

​​​​In the summer of the 2000 I was doing some research for an idea I had about a novel. My writing success had come in non-fiction, but the illusive novel still beckoned.

​In this fictional piece I imagined a character who learned his mother had been a woman pilot in World War II and her crashed plane and her remains had just been discovered in a melting glacier in Montana.

I put a note on what I was doing on a Women’s Air Force Pilot user group on Yahoo. The result was unexpected.

I was contacted by the grand niece of Gertrude “Tommy” Tompkins. Laura Whittall-Scherfee, who lives near Sacramento, told me that of the 38 women killed in the WASP during World War II, her grand aunt was the only one still missing.​​​

She was called, “The Other Amelia,” and a sort of cult had grown among the searchers who continue to look for her to this day. Laura and her husband Ken offered me access to the family records. Would I be interested?

Would I ever!

I’d always had a fascination for World War II aviation, and this was an enticement I couldn’t refuse.​It took seventeen years of interviews, combing military files and reading private correspondence to finally give Tommy the fully-dimensional place in aviation history she deserved. I was lucky to have conversations with a number of WASPs early in my research. Today only about 85 WASPs of the 1,175 who were in service during the war are still alive.Tommy took off from Mines Air Field (now LAX) on October 26, 1944, and was expected to stay at the Army Air Force Base in Palm Springs that evening. She was never seen again. Aircraft historian Pat Macha has conducted numerous searches over the years and no trace has ever turned up.

Below: A group of WASPs pray for luck before climbing into a BT-13 unpredictable and sometimes dangerous training plane. Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas, circa 1943.

Courtesy WASP Archives, Texas Women's University Library.

The conclusion I have come to after all this time is that she probably crashed into Santa Monica Bay immediately after take-off.

The results of searches of the bay and of the mountains and deserts on her presumed flight path are documented in Seized by the Sun. It’s a mystery yet to be solved, and there are men and women still searching for Tommy.

Above, WASPs with PT-19, the first plane usually flown in primary training. Women on far left in dark glasses is Gertrude “Tommy” Tompkins, according to Texas Women’s University Libraries WASP Archives.

​No one knows whether Elizabeth Kenny had any formal medical training or learned on-the-job, but that didn’t stop her.

She had a red cape and nurse’s jumper made and traveled through Australia’s wild bush land to serve anyone who needed help.​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​

Born in Australia in 1880, at a time when girls were not to be brassy, stubborn, or opinionated. Elizabeth had no intention of following those rules.

I first heard about Elizabeth Kenny when my father had a stroke and was transferred to the Elizabeth Kenny Institute in Minneapolis for recovery. Prior to that, I knew of her in name only.

Author Susan Latta

​​I remember standing in a long line in the school gym waiting to receive my vaccination in the early 1960s, and had no idea how many people suffered after being stricken by polio.Decades earlier Elizabeth Kenny had become famous for her treatment for polio, a dreadful virus that caused paralysis and death.

Elizabeth didn’t know it at the time but discovered her polio treatment one day in 1911.

​A frantic farmer called for help for his two-year-old daughter. Amy's arms andlegs were twisted tight with unbearable pain.

Elizabeth Kenny galloped away to send a telegram to her trusted doctor, Aeneas McDonnell. When he replied that it was polio, he said there was nothing to be done, and to do “the best with symptoms presenting themselves.”

"I knew the relaxing power of heat," Elizabeth said. "I filled a frying pan with salt, placed it over the fire, then poured it into a bag and applied it to the leg that was giving the most pain. After an anxious wait, I saw no relief followed the application. I then prepared a linseed meal poultice, but the weight of this seemed only to increase the pain.

"At last I tore a blanket made from soft Australian wool into suitable strips and wrung them out in boiling water. These I wrapped gently about the poor tortured muscles. The whimpering of the child ceased almost immediately, and after a few more applications her eyes closed slowly and she fell asleep.”

Amy recovered. But men in the medical field refused to accept Elizabeth's methods.

In 1914, Elizabeth Kenny traveled to England to serve in WWI. The Australian Army Nursing Service gave her the title of “sister,” which had nothing to do with religion, instead meaning “senior nurse.” She became known as Sister Kenny.

After the war, she presented her methods to control the muscle spasms and re-educate the paralyzed limbs to packed rooms of medical men in Australia. Over and over they called her a quack nurse from the bush, and finally she had had enough. She sailed to America to prove her treatment.

After being turned away by doctors in New York and Chicago, she landed in Minnesota where a few doctors said her treatment did work.

As word spread she gained nationwide support, even landing on a list of most admired women in America nine years running. ​​​​​​​The Elizabeth Kenny Institute opened in 1942, and still exists today as Courage Kenny, a facility for stroke and accident victims.​At right: A patient is treated in an Iron Lung circa 1960s. Photo courtesy U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Polio was eradicated in America when Albert Sabin’s live polio virus vaccine guaranteed immunity, just a few short years after Sister Kenny died in 1952.​​​​​​​

During my research into the American WWII Nurses captured POW by the Japanese, I learned they were the "first large group" of American women sent into combat.

When I wrote PURE GRITI didn't know about the Hello Girls, a group of American women, telephone operators, who volunteered for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War I.

The terms "large group" and "combat" can be debated, but what's clear is that here is another group of brave women that have only recently begun to take their rightful place in history.

Grace Banker (right) was one of 223 women telephone operators who shipped out to England and France with American troops to aid communicationbetween commanders and soldiers on the battlefield.

Grace was the chief operator of a small group sent to the front during the Muese-Argonne Offensive, the deadliest campaign in U.S. military history, killing 26,000 Americans in the final terrible onslaught that ended the war.

The seven women operators worked near Verdun, France, connecting calls while German planes flew overhead and shrapnel landed close by.

On October 30, 1919, two weeks before the war ended, a number of buildings housing American headquarters went up in flames. ​​​​​​​The women were ordered to leave the switchboard, but they refused, continuing to connect calls as the fire raged nearer and nearer.

They refused to leave their posts until threatened with disciplinary action by their superior officer. When the fire was doused an hour later, the women returned to the switchboard, found some of the lines still working and picked up where they had left off. The seven women later received Distinguished Service Medals for their courage and dedication to duty.

When U.S. troops arrived to join the war in Europe, they found the telephone service in France badly damaged by years of combat. Signal Corps crews quickly stretched a far-flung web of lines across Allied territory to hook up communication between units in battle, supply depots and military headquarters.

General John J. Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces was frustrated with French telephone operators who didn't speak English and tended to spend time on social niceties before connecting calls.

He sent an urgent appeal to American newspapers for women who could speak French, operate the complicated switchboards, and free up men for combat. Seven-thousand women applied.

Only 450-were chosen for military training, and half of those deployed to Europe. Most were already trained operators employed by U.S. telephone companies, and dexterous enough to connect five calls in the time a man did one.

During the Muese-Argonne Offensive, they connected over 150,000 calls a day.

Identity papers for Blanche B. Grande-Maitre (above) show her to be five-foot-two and 110 pounds. The contracts the Hello Girls signed differed little from army enlistment papers, and they "signed up for the duration."

At the switchboard in Tours, France

hey were treated just like soldiers and subject to the same “discomforts and dangers” including

unheated barracks, bombings and mortar fire, according to the Oct. 4, 1918 edition of the army newspaper Stars and Stripes.

“According to their superior officers, both in the Signal Corps and on the General Staff, they have shown remarkable spirit and utter absence of nerves.”

General Pershing praised the women's work, saying they had more patience and perseverance for the job than men, and other officers believed they played a crucial role in helping win the war.

But like the nurses in Pure Grit, when the hostilities ceased and they returned home, because they were women, they were not given their due. The Hello Girls did not qualify as veterans, receiving no benefits, and only a handful were recognized with medals.

It took an act of congress, and sixty years before the Hello Girls received their Honorable army discharges, veteran status and victory medals. Fifty of the women remained alive to enjoy the moment.

Author

I'm an award-winning author of Children's/YA books and former journalist with a passion for stories about people facing adversity with courage. My books have been named Notable Social Studies Book for Young People, SPUR Award for Best Juvenile Fiction about the American West, Bank Street College List of Best Children's Books, and NY Public Library Best Books for Teens. My journalistic work has received numerous awards for excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists and two Emmy nominations.